First, though, is the announcement that tomorrow we'll be starting Book #30, The Reunion, with Marco narrating!

But that's for tomorrow. For now, let's talk about how time travel is used in these books

We're first made aware of the possibility of time travel waaaay back in book 11 with the sario rip that throws them into the Amazon, and then it pretty quickly comes back as an actual thing that can be done for real in the Andalite Chronicles. It gets resurrected in a few other places, most notably in the book we just finished, but it's never all that

prominent in the grand scheme of things

(I'm not counting book 7 in that list because it was an Ellimist-constructed "possible future," not clear time travel, but the idea is sort of first introduced in that book even if it's not actually used until 11)

There are generally two "versions" of time travel, malleable and self-sustaining. Self-sustaining is what you see in Harry Potter (Cursed Child can go dive into a volcano), but Applegate rolls with the idea that time can be changed if you can go far back enough

The logical thing she does bring up and that some other authors fail to is that you don't know how you're going to affect time when you change it. Loren wasn't changing anything but her age and a bit of life experience when she used it, but former Visser Four was obviously looking for much bigger changes

What do you all think about the use of time travel in this series at all? Was it a good idea to introduce it? Was it just a cop-out to try and weave together things she hadn't fully planned and suddenly had to explain? Did it make for more exciting adventures while letting the kids get on with their lives?

Do you think there's a difference between the sario rips and their limited duration and the actual time travel we see with the Time Matrix? Do you think one was better than the other, could one have been good for the series on its own, or both, or none?

We'll be back tomorrow to start the new book!

Speaking as another total nerd for time travel stories

... I noticed sario rips seem to be strictly deterministic, or nearly so?

There doesn't seem to be much in the way of actually changing the past in the sario rip stories

And we even nearly had a stable time loop in one of them

But the time matrix seems much more focused on making actual tangible changes in the timeline

Space and time both seem to be fair game for them, I agree